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July 21, 2009

Social Media Policy Outside and Inside the Enterprise

I am cross posting this from FastFoward to get more feedback and perhaps additional examples. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise. I think companies are focusing their guidelines too much on public use.

As the use of social media grows within the enterprise and on the Web, the need for policies and guidelines to govern employee behavior becomes more essential. Effective use of social media requires that employees can act on their own to produce content without review by Corporate Communications or other groups. I remember in my past life with a large consulting firm and prior to the rise of social media every time I talked with the media, a PR person had to be on the call. Now customer and market communication is more and more handed over to individual employees.

However, to avoid violations of company security and such things as government regulations for publically traded companies, some guidance is necessary. I remember in the early days of blogging IBM relied on its standard rules of business conduct. Then in the spring of 2005, IBM used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines. Here is the latest version: IBM Social Computing Guidelines. It begins with the following.

“These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”

You find the details at their site. Other companies have embraced this concept. Sun was another of the early adopters. Sun's policy begins with this statement, Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.” I think this captures the right spirit for these efforts.

Intel has released new social media guidelines. It has also created a Social Media department and offers training for employees who are interested in blogging and participating in online forums and other social media venues where they represent Intel (see Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees). I like the addition of training.

These guidelines are not limited to the large players. RightNow provides a suite of CRM tools that I have covered on this blog (see Barack Obama’s Answer Center - Campaign CRM from RightNow and most recently RightNow is Enabling Further Government Adoption of the Cloud). RightNow's guidelines state that, “RightNow has an open participation policy for all employees. The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you decide to participate, you are making a commitment to following these guidelines.” I was told that RightNow’s guidelines were influenced by the work of Intel, IBM and Sun.

Social media guidelines should not be limited to market facing channels. Use inside the enterprise raises many adoption issues and they are no less important here. Some employee concerns can be clarified by a good set of guidelines. If done right these policies can actually encourage participation as employees are likely to feel more comfortable that their actions are sanctioned. They will also feel like they know the rules.

HI Bill,
Great article. Thanks for linking to my piece in Forbes (We met at the Fast Forward conference earlier this year b.t.w.). The more work I do in this area the more I am convinced that it is much more than a set of hard-policies, but a chance to set the tone for the entire organization - an entry point for many different groups (mktg, legal, HR etc.) to come together and understand how social technologies might present opportunities and risks.